Visual choice
Bar and column for comparison, line for trend, scatter for relationships, matrix for lookup, card and KPI for single figures, map for geography.
Avoid pie beyond three slices, and treat gauges sceptically — they consume a lot of space for one number a card would show more clearly. Custom visuals from AppSource can help, but each one is a dependency and a possible governance issue.
Interactions
By default, clicking a visual cross-filters the others on the page. Format → Edit interactions lets you set each target to filter, highlight, or none.
This is worth doing explicitly on any page with more than three visuals. Uncontrolled cross-filtering makes reports feel unpredictable, and turning it off for reference tables is usually right.
Navigation features
Bookmarks capture the state of a page — filters, selections, visual visibility — and can be triggered by buttons to build toggles and custom navigation.
Drillthrough sends a user from a summary to a detail page carrying the selected context. Drill down moves through a hierarchy inside one visual. Report page tooltips let a hover show a whole mini-page instead of plain text.
Sync slicers keep slicer selections consistent across pages, which prevents the common complaint that filters reset when navigating.
Conditional formatting
Any format property can be driven by a measure through the fx button — background colour, font colour, data bars, icons, even a title string.
A measure returning a hex code lets you encode business rules directly:
Status Colour =
SWITCH(TRUE(),
[Margin %] < 0.1, "#F0715C",
[Margin %] < 0.2, "#F5B84E",
"#2DD9C9"
)This keeps the rule in one place instead of scattered across visual settings.